“I’m a nurse and was previously working at an assisted living community on the dementia/Alzheimer’s unit.

My very favorite patient had been declining pretty steadily so I was checking on him very frequently. We would have long chats and joke around with each other, but in the last two weeks of his life, he stopped talking completely and didn’t really acknowledge conversation directed at him at all.

I finished my medication rounds for the evening and went to see him before I left. I told him I was leaving for the night and that I’d see him the following day, and he looked me in the eyes and smiled SO genuinely and said, ‘You look like an angel.’ I thought it was so sweet because he had not seemed lucid in weeks.

“‘Get home safe, little one.’ It wasn’t what he said – he said the same thing to me any time I had him as a patient for the evening. It was how he said it. He gave me this look and pause like he knew. The DNR’s in my experience, always know when it’s time. It’s creepy.”

“My mom was watching over my great-grandfather in the hospital. He’d been unresponsive for a day or so, when suddenly he said: ‘It’s about damn time you got here! I’ve been waiting!’ And then he died.”

“DNR patient was on comfort cares. Was on a high dose of morphine and hallucinating. She would alternate between grasping for things not there and trying to climb out of bed. She was too unsteady to walk so my job was to sit in the room and make sure she was safe. She tried to get up and I went to ask her what she needed. She grabbed my arm and pulled me down towards her face and said, very angrily, ‘kill me’. That one f*cked with me for awhile.”

“Not a nurse, not a doctor, but I’m an apprentice funeral director. We went to a nursing home on a removal and as we were walking down the hall one of the patients got antsy and opened the door to his room and saw us walking with the stretcher.

“Ugh. I was a hospice nurse for many years. Super gratifying job for a nurse, surprisingly. As a ‘regular’ nurse, you are rarely offered thanks. Hospice nursing is an island unto itself. Mostly peaceful, lots of times sad, often a blessing.

This is sad, but also creepy, and I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it. Had a 20 year old kid, gang member, who was dying of primary liver cancer. Super unusual, aggressive, and terminal. He was angry at the universe. His family was there to comfort him, but he literally spit in their faces. Every ounce of energy he had left was angry and mean and ugly. His mom would beg him to lighten up and accept Jesus into his heart. He would swing at her and tell her to eff herself. The family remained beside, in hopes he would chillout at the end.

His last day, hours, moments, he was angry. The family called me into the room, and told me they thought he was going (he wasn’t responding, Cheyne-Stokes breaths, eyes glossy and skin cold–the end was imminent.) His lovely mother, in her dearest attempt, whispered to him to go towards the light, to her Jesus. With his dying breath he opened his eyes, looked at her and said ‘Eff your Jesus!!!’.

A second or two later, he slowly turned his head to the to the left, and got the most horrific look on his face as if he was looking at something we couldn’t see, and horrified, like in a bad movie, his face contorted, and he screamed with his last breath, eyes wide, ‘Oh sh*t, oh sh*t, OH NOOOOOOO!!!!’, then made a guttural noise and promptly fell back into the bed and died. Every family member was shaking and too frightened to speak, and I left the room and took two days off. I don’t care if I never find out what he saw.”

“A nice old lady who told my CNA she wanted to wear all white. When asked why, she said ‘the man in black is here.’ She looked in the corner of the room. The CNA looked, but there was no one there.

That’s when I came into the room. We asked her to describe what she was seeing and she said ‘he’s in all black, and he’s got a top hat on.’

Then she whispered ‘and his eyes are red’ while her eyes moved across the room to directly behind the CNA, like she was watching him move closer to us. She died later that night. But it was unexpected. That room creeped me out for a long time after that.”

“I was a home health aide for awhile and I took care of a woman in her late 80s-90s. While she didn’t die and as far as I know is still alive she was ‘dying.’

She would be lying in bed and just start yelling shit like ‘Take me now, Jesus. I am ready!’ ‘I see him, Jesus is coming for me!’ I would always rush in there and when she would see me, would tell me she was ready to die but knew our deal and she’d wait. Our deal was that if she wanted to die, could she please waiting until my shift was over?

She would also hallucinate constantly and was always confused. She would tell me her husband (dead for years) was coming over with some Navy buddies and she’d set me up ‘because a girl my age really ought to be married by now.’

She also had breast implants and liked to show them off and force you to touch them.”

“‘The devil has been in my room all night, but don’t worry, God is with you.’ This man had like the worst death ever too. He had a horrendous seizure and died with his eyes wide open and had a horrible grimace on his face. He had also been yelling all night about the ‘devil’ and saying over and over, ‘Get out of here! This building’s gonna blow!’”

“‘Get off me you bastard, you’re trying to kill me.’ A 60-odd year old woman in a lot of pain from a rupturing abdominal aortic aneurysm. She was too sick to survive major surgery, I was trying to ease the pain of her passing with morphine.”

“Nurse here – had a patient come into the ER with shortness of breath. He started deteriorating in the ER, and then quite rapidly on the transport up the ICU.

We got him wheeled into his room, replaced the ER lines and tubes with our own, and transferred him from the transport stretcher to his ICU bed.

He actually did most of the transfer himself. He didn’t say anything, but just before he died he pleasantly adjusted his own pillow, laid his head down, and then his eyes went blank. This man just made himself comfortable before laying down to die.”

“My Grandpa died from diabetes complications at home after having a leg taken. However my uncle, his youngest, was working in another country. We told him ‘ok papa you have to wait for Bruce to get here.’ He asked how long? We said about 17 hours. The last words I heard him say were:

’17 hours huh? That’s a long time…but ok.’

He went unresponsive after that and He died literally 20 minutes after my uncle got there and got to have some time to say goodbye. He waited, and he’s a bada** for that.”

“I live in the Pacific NW and there was a rupture of the Olympic Pipeline in Bellingham in 1999. The petroleum flowed into Whatcom Creek. There were two little boys playing in the creek behind one of their houses with a barbecue lighter. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and the petroleum flowing into the creek was set on fire by the lighter they were playing with. It became a conflagration. We could see the thick black smoke pouring into the air from 25 miles away.

From what I remember, one of the older brothers and a couple of his friends ran out to the creek behind their house and brought the boys out of the water.

The little guys were severely burnt but in shock and with adrenaline running didn’t realize how hurt they were. I still cry when I think about it to this day when I read that the little guys thought that they had caused the explosion from playing in the creek with a lighter.

Worse, and this actually haunts me, is one of the boys telling the rescuers that ‘Oh, my mom is going to be so mad that I ruined my new clothes.’

These little guys died the next day of their burns. It was an unbearable account.”

“I work in long term care, and one of my residents was dying from lung cancer, we knew it was going to happen any day and she did too, she repeatedly stated she didn’t want to be alone so all Friday night nurses took turns sitting with her, when I came in Saturday morning they asked if I would sit with ( I worked in recreation).

She was such a sweetheart and had no children but had a niece who hardly visited and when we called Friday basically said call me when she is dead.

Anyway this lady was labouring to breathe, in and out of conscious but would always squeeze my hand if I squeezed hers. Finally I whispered in her ear, ‘the nurse just told me your niece is on the way’ she died less than five minutes later, she just wanted to know someone was coming. Her niece never came ???? “

Yeah, I’m pretty sure some of those came straight out of my nightmares. I feel scared, sad, and a little bit of “what the f*ck?”. I’m super glad I didn’t chose to become a doctor. The money’s probably nice and it would be hugely rewarding, but Jesus, this stuff is horrifying.